


Grief

by helloitshaley



Category: Addams Family - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, I was going through it, I'm so sorry for this, Trigger warning for suicide, this gets pretty heavy so pack it in folks, this is all hurt and little comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:21:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26886532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helloitshaley/pseuds/helloitshaley
Summary: A home invasion gone wrong results in Gomez losing the most important person in his life. Needless to say, he doesn't handle his grief very well.
Relationships: Gomez Addams/Morticia Addams
Comments: 24
Kudos: 34





	Grief

It all happened in a flash. One moment they were elated over the prospect of break in, then the next Gomez’s world came crashing down around him. He watched, seemingly stuck in some kind of slow motion purgatory as the masked home invaders broke down their bedroom door and opened fire, seemingly not caring who or what they hit, only hoping to hit something. And hit something they did.

She didn’t even scream. Gomez did, but Morticia didn’t. Not as the bullet hit her temple, not as she crashed lifelessly to the ground. Nothing. Nothing but the sound of the gunshot, Gomez’s blood ringing in his ears, and the animalistic scream of heartache that tore up from his chest and out his throat, seemingly endless.

It was a nightmare, it had to be. She couldn’t just be here one moment and gone the next. His wife could not just be laying in a heap on the floor, her blood spilling over her alabaster skin, making her raven hair slick before it pooled on the dark wood beneath her head. The world couldn’t be cruel enough for this to be his reality.

He tried to run to her, but it felt like he was stuck in quicksand. He should have shielded her, he should have insisted she hid instead of being naively joyous about what turned into a horrific event. Gomez couldn’t even register that the attackers were still in the room. He needed to get to Morticia, needed to see that she was fine. He needed to see that it was just a flesh wound, she was just unconscious and would wake back up at any moment.

Something stung his arm, but it hardly phased him. Her name tumbled out of his mouth in a desperate plea for her to hear him. A desperate plea for her to sit up and smile, or perhaps to shake him awake from the hell he was caught in.

“Morticia!” he screamed, slipping in her blood as he finally reached her side.

It wasn’t right. She didn’t look right. Gomez stared in abject horror at his wife’s face, which was frozen with a look of shock as blood streamed down over her open, empty eyes. He cried out again, grabbing her by the shoulders. Stiff, she was so, so stiff.

“Morticia,” he croaked. “No, Morticia!”

He wanted to turn, to unleash his rage on the scum that caused this, but he couldn’t leave her. He faintly heard them whispering before their footsteps retreated, leaving him alive. They couldn’t even afford him the mercy of killing him as well. He would have begged for death if he had been in any frame of mind to do so.

Still in shock he jerked her lifeless body into his arms, holding her in a crushing grip as he sobbed and sobbed into her shoulder. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. It didn’t even cross his mind to see if the children or the rest of his family were intact. His entire world had been ripped from him. His reason for living, gone in the blink of an eye.

“Morticia,” he moaned, feeling his heart actually tear in his chest. He prayed for a heart attack, anything to take him from this world and put him back with his beloved.

“Father?” a small voice gasped from the doorway.

He couldn’t look up. He couldn’t address his daughter, who was thankfully alive. More voices joined in, the sound of police sirens approaching cutting through his skull. He wanted them all to leave. He wanted to be alone with his wife.

He couldn’t stand how stiff and cold she had become in such a short span of time. He held her tighter, hoping to force some kind of softness back into her body. He cried her name between bouts of incoherent screaming and sobbing.

A hand touched his shoulder and he violently shook it off. “Gomez, come with me,” his mother said softly.

“I’m not leaving her,” he whimpered, pressing his face to her blood soaked neck.

“Son, you have to.”

“Kill me,” he pleaded. “Kill me too.”

One week

For an Addams, funerals were a fun occasion. However, Gomez had never anticipated attending Morticia’s. Theirs was supposed to happen simultaneously. The celebration could have happened under those circumstances. This, however, was no cause for joy. He just felt numb. A piece of him was going to be buried, never to be seen by him again. Never again would he kiss his way up her arm, finally coming to a halt at her soft lips. Never again would he pull her into a spontaneous waltz. Never again would he have someone to turn to with some quip or dirty remark. Never again would he look into his lover’s eyes. His best friend’s eyes. The eyes of the person who changed his entire world.

Gomez let out a choked sob as he approached Morticia’s casket. Everyone else in the cemetery was a blur, a small dot at the side of his vision. He could only focus on his wife’s dead body, laying in a fucking casket. Dead. She was fucking dead. He was angry beyond comprehension while feeling like a lifeless shell of a man at the same time. It almost made him dizzy, wishing he would topple forward and bash his brains in on the hard, black wood of the casket. 

He reached out and touched her cold cheek. To think she was pale when she was alive… he almost wanted to slap a bit of color back into her cheek. Do anything to make her look like his living, breathing, Morticia. She looked too doll-like, lying there in her favorite dress, her makeup perfectly done, her hair falling to cover the bullet hole in her skull.

“Tish,” he murmured, a tear falling from his eye to land on her hand, drawing his eyes toward her enormous, ruby wedding ring. Knowing she would want to be buried with it was the only thing keeping him from prying it off her finger.

“How could they take you from me?” he whispered. “You can’t be dead. Sit up.”

“Father.” Wednesday was at his side, Pugsley at his other. They looked at him in concern, tears rimming their eyes. “Come sit.”

“No,” he said. “No. Your mother is either going to get up right now and prove that this was all a nightmare or I am joining her in there.”

“But, Father,” Pugsley whispered, taking his arm. “We need you.”

“She isn’t getting up,” Wednesday said, a slight quiver in her normally even voice. “She’s gone.”

“Then I’m going too,” Gomez said, pulling his hand away from Morticia’s to reach into his pocket. He pulled out a slim knife and aimed it at his throat before it was cruelly knocked from his hand.

“Gomez, let's go inside,” Fester said, tightly gripping his shoulders, inadvertently squeezing the bullet wound that wasn’t even good enough to end his life. “This isn’t what Morticia would want.”

“You don’t know that!” Gomez yelled, shoving Fester away.

Fester bit his lip, looking at his brother with something akin to pity. “Come on, Gomez. You’ve said your goodbyes, we’ll sit inside.”

Gomez shook his head, looking over Fester’s shoulder at Morticia’s still face. “I could never say goodbye. I’ll never let go of her.”

One Month

Gomez sat stock still in the back of the courtroom, watching as the judge sentenced the vile, despicable, pieces of shit that killed his wife to life in prison. Two men, hardly in their forties with nothing special about them whatsoever. Life in prison wasn’t enough. Even the death sentence wouldn’t have been enough. Gomez wanted them to suffer as he had. To know the pain that still tore his heart to shreds every waking moment of the day.

He had ways to make such a thing a reality, yet he did nothing. He could have rigged a bomb to go off in the courtroom, but he didn’t. He could have waited outside to rip them limb to limb, but instead he sat in the back of the courtroom until the bailiff told him he had to leave.

So leave he did. Wordlessly he stood and walked home, all the while hoping a drunk driver would swerve onto the curb and erase him from the planet. The pathetic excuse the defense attorney offered rang in his ears on repeat as he struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

“They thought no one lived there, your honor.”

“Bullshit,” Gomez scoffed aloud as he continued down the sidewalk. They had one goal in mind and it was to cause pain and suffering. 

He was trapped in an endless torment from which there was no relief. His family had the nerve to remove all the weapons in his possession, putting him on an eternal suicide watch. If they really loved him, they would just let him die… 

One Month and One Day

The edge of the roof. It was a lot longer down than Gomez thought. From this side of the house, if he was lucky, he would land on the wrought iron fence around Morticia’s poisonous plant garden. The thought of one of the spikes impaling his heart was nearly enough to bring a smile to his face, though he knew he would never truly smile again until he was reunited with her.

He shuffled closer to the edge, the wind whipping up around him. One more step and he would see Morticia again. One more step and the suffering would end. For a brief moment, guilt over leaving the children parentless flashed through his mind, but his suffering was just too intense for him to focus on that for too long. How could he go on when the constant pain in his heart reminded him of what he was missing? His was no longer a life worth living.

With one last deep breath, he stuck one foot over the edge before he felt a strong arm around his waist, yanking him back. “No,” Gomez wailed as he crashed back against Lurch’s chest. “No, Lurch, let me jump!”

“I’m sorry, Sir,” was Lurch’s stoic reply.

“Please!” Gomez pleaded as Lurch dragged him like a child back inside. “Let me join her! Please!”

Five months

“You’re upsetting them,” she muttered, her voice filling his chest with a warmth that had all but disappeared, if only fleetingly. 

“I can see that,” he murmured, his back sliding down the wall of the closet. He clutched one of her dresses tightly to his chest, breathing in the still lingering scent of her perfume. He closed his eyes tightly, feeling her presence settle in beside him. “I can see it and yet…”

“They’re our children.”

“Our children,” he echoed, pulling his knees to his chest to rest his forehead on. He knew looking up would be too painful, to realize Morticia wasn’t actually there and he was speaking to a room full of neglected dresses.

“They lost their mother-”

“Please don’t,” he choked. Five months and it wasn’t any easier. It never would be.

“They don’t deserve to lose their father as well. All those suicide attempts are weighing on them.”

Hot tears pulsed out of his eyes. Of course she was right, she always was. “I can’t do this without you.”

“You must.”

Gomez shivered at the phantom touch of her hand on his shoulder. “You’re my everything, Morticia.”

“I was.”

“You still are,” he said fiercely, finally lifting his head only to see emptiness before him. 

The silence was deafening. The urge to scream at the top of his lungs was overwhelming to fill the suffocating void around him. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, just a soft gasp.

“Gomez, are you in the closet again?” Fester’s voice shattered his heartbroken trance.

“Leave me,” he muttered, curling on his side beneath the long hems of Morticia’s dresses. 

“Mama made yak stew, your favorite.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You never are, but you have to eat.” For the first time in forever, Fester was taking the approach of a caring, responsible brother. Gomez resented him for it. If anything, it should be his job to indulge Gomez in his madness. “You’re wasting away. It isn’t as attractive as one might think.”

True that Gomez’s suits now hung on him like a child wearing his father’s clothes and he couldn’t remember the last time he showered, let alone shaved, but appearance didn’t much matter to him anymore. Eating didn’t matter, dressing didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Gomez let out a long sigh, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Go away, Fester,” he said weakly. “I’m a grown man.”

“You aren’t acting like it,” Fester shot back.

Gomez attempted to shoot to his feet, but in his weakened state it was more of a stagger. “I lost my wife, Fester!” he yelled, yanking open the closet door.

Fester took a startled step back, concern for Gomez written across his face. “We all lost Morticia. It hurt all of us. Especially the children.”

“Especially me,” Gomez gritted out, hardly containing the tears that were itching to spill from his eyes. “I lost my soul mate.”

“Do you think Morticia wants you wasting away in the closet?” 

“You don’t know what she wants!” Gomez cried, gripping the doorknob so hard he thought it would break. “Now leave me alone.” He retreated into the closet, slamming the door in the process.

One Year

He looked blankly at Wednesday, her words hardly registering in his ears. He was too distracted noticing all the similarities between his daughter and his late wife. What a cruel reminder she was. A reminder he still loved deeply, but looking at her made his heart clench with a numb pain.

“Would you please listen to me?” Wednesday finally snapped. “I’m sorry to be disrespectful, but you have got to snap out of this.”

“You don’t understand, Wednesday,” he sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. He squeezed his tired eyes shut, wishing the world would just melt away. A meteor strike would be much welcomed at the moment.

“I don’t understand?” she whispered, the hurt palpable in her normally flat voice. “I went to bed one night thinking I would wake up to find my mother looming over me as always. Instead I wake up to find her brains splattered across the floor.”

Gomez cringed. He didn’t need the details rehashed at him. “Please don’t say that.”

“We can’t just never speak about it!” Wednesday insisted. “It's been a year, Pugsley and I need you. We need you to acknowledge what happened so we can all start to get on with our lives.”

“You think I’m not acknowledging it?” Gomez asked, his voice cracking as he hid his face in his hands. “It's all I think about every second of the day. How could I possibly get on with my life? By all means, you and your brother should move ahead, but I cannot!”

“Think about what might happen to Pugsley and I if you kill yourself over your grief,” Wednesday said, getting up to pull Gomez’s hands away from his face. “What would happen to us? We’re minors.”

“You have Fester and Mama…”

“We want you!” Wednesday yelled. Gomez could have sworn that was the first time he had ever heard her voice raised. Even as a baby she never so much as screamed. “We want our father! This isn’t fair to us!”

He looked up to see tears streaming down her cheeks, and he felt guilt as well as grief gripping at his heart. How selfish he had been, he could see that clearly written across her face. Of course his children had lost their mother, why should he assume it was any easier for them? “Oh, Wednesday…” he said, opening his arms.

She unabashedly crashed into his lap and began sobbing into his neck, hugging her father with a vice grip. “I miss her too,” she mumbled through the tears. “I miss you.” 

Gomez felt horrendous. What would Morticia say? He knew what everyone else would say, but how would Morticia react to his neglectfulness? She would be so disappointed. “I’m sorry, Wednesday. I… I’m going to try to do better.”

“Please,” she whimpered. “I love you.”

“I love you too. I’m sorry if I haven’t been acting like it,” he said, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll try my best to do better.”

Eighteen Months

“You look better,” she mused. “You look like yourself.”

He set down his razor, looking up in the mirror to examine his mustache. It had been a while since he had seen it so tidy. It was almost getting lost in the stubble he was neglecting on his face. “It's amazing what a shave can do,” he joked half heartedly. 

“And a shower.” He could almost hear the smile in her voice. “I’m proud of you.”

He let out a small, choked sob. He gripped the edge of the marble sink, biting into his lip to try to get his sobs under control. “Thank you, Tish. God, it just… it doesn’t get easier.”

“Maybe it doesn’t get easier, but you can still get better.”

He nodded. He was determined to, for his children’s sake. “Going to a school function without you is going to be all but impossible.”

“Be happy for me that I never have to sit though another one.”

“Tish,” he half laughed half sobbed. “Your morbid humor is a bit more unsettling from beyond the grave.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she responded without missing a beat.

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

“You should go put your suit on,” she said softly, and he could have sworn he felt her presence at his side. The cool breeze made him shiver, but it also filled him with an unimaginable warmth. A warmth that had been missing for eighteen months. “You don’t want to be late.”

“Very well,” he sighed, reaching for the silk tie on the sink, thinking about how Morticia would always tie it for him. “I love you, Morticia,” he barely managed to force past his lips.

“And I love you, so much, mon cher.”

“Do you have to go?” he asked, getting only silence in response. 

He still wasn’t sure if he was actually speaking to his wife or if it was just his imagination. Either way, it made him feel better. Their love was so strong, he wouldn’t doubt her being able to reach him from the other side. And the lingering smell of her perfume couldn’t be conjured just from his mind.

She may be gone, but she was still here. In spirit, in Wednesday’s icy stare, in Pugsley’s love of learning, in the house, in the garden where Mama has taken up the mantle of decapitating flowers. She would never truly be gone. 

“Just… don’t ever get remarried,” her voice said from out of nowhere.

Gomez laughed for the first time in who knows how long. “You never have to worry about that, querida mia. Not in a million years.”

**Author's Note:**

> Again, I'm really sorry for this. If you made it though I'm giving you a virtual hug. Anyway, you can yell at me in the comments or on Tumblr @helloitshaley


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